The

Photography Reader

Edited by

Liz Wells

I~ ~~o~~~;;n~~~up

LONDON AND NEW YORK

442 DAVID BATE

techno-ideological project of renaissance picturing systems that has governed Western thought ever since. Perspective remains the order of Photoshop as much as it does the camera obscura, discovered so long before photography. Education then, should retain a critical distance to, and awareness of these functions and fluctuations in image culture.

Notes

Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution, London: Hogarth Press, 1992, p. 125.

2 'Culture' for Williams means the 'whole way of life'. See his Culture and Society, Penguin, 1979.

3 This is Lyotard's definition of post modernism in The Postmodern Condition, Manchester University Press, 1986, p. 79.

4 See Roland Barthes, 'That Old Thing, Art ... ' The Responsibility if Forms, translated by Richard Howard, University of California Press, 1991.

5 Peter Wollen, 'Photography and Aesthetics', Screen, vol. 19, no. 4, winter 1978-79.

6 The internal differences within conceptual art and between artists is here less important than their collective distinction from 'art photography' and photographers. The anathema directed towards the 'fine print' of the former was only equalled by the hostility to the 'anti-aesthetic' by the latter.

7 Victor Burgin (ed.) Thinking Photography, Macmillan, 1982, p. 2.

8 A.L. Rees and F. Borzollo, (eds) The New Art History, Camden Press, 1986.

9 Victor Burgin, The End if Art Theory, Macmillan, 1986, p. 204. Author's emphasis,

10 Paul Virilio, The Lost Dimension, Semiotext(e), 1991.

II Walter Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', I11uminations, Fontana, 1980, pp. 227-8.

12 Wollen, 'Photography and Aesthetics' Screen, vol. 19, no. 4, winter 1978-79, p. 17.

13 Mary Kelly, 'Re- Viewing Modernist Criticism' Art ?/ter Modernism, ed. B. Wallis, New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984, p. 97.

14 Roland Barthes, La Chambre claire, Paris: Gallimard, 1980, p. 98. (My emphasis.)

Chapter 42

Allan Sekula

READING AN ARCHIVE

Photography between labour and capital

Every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own threatens to disappear irretrievably.

Walter Benjamin!

The invention of photography. For whom? Against whom?

Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin/

HER E I S YET AN 0 THE R BOO K 0 F PH 0 TOG RAP H S. All were made in the industrial and coal-mining regions of Cape Breton in the two decades between 1948 and 1968. All were made by one man, a commercial photographer named Leslie Shedden. At first glance, the economics of this work seem simple and common enough: proprietor of the biggest and only successful photographic studio in the town of Glace Bay, Shedden produced pictures on demand for a variety of clients. Thus in the range of his commissions we discover the limits of economic relations in a coal town. His largest Single customer was the coal company. And prominent among the less official customers who walked in the door of Shedden Studio were the coal miners and their families. Somewhere in between the company and the workers were local shopkeepers who, like Shedden himself, depended on the miners' income for their own livelihood and who saw photography as a sensible means of local promotion.

Why stress these economic realities at the outset, as if to flaunt the 'crude thinking' often called for by Bertolt Brecht? Surely our understandings of these photographs cannot be reduced to a knowledge of economic conditions. This latter knowledge is necessary but insufficient; we also need to grasp the way in which photography constructs an imaginary world and passes it off as reality. The aim of this essay, then, is to try to understand something of the relationship between photographiC culture and economic life. How does photography serve to legitimate and normalise existing power relationships? How does it serve as the voice of authority,

444 ALLAN SEKULA

while simultaneously claiming to constitute a token of exchange between equal partners? What havens and temporary escapes from the realm of necessity are provided by photographic means? What resistances are encouraged and strengthened? How is historical and social memory preserved, transformed, restricted and obliterated by photographs? What futures are promised; what futures are forgotten? In the broadest sense, these questions concern the ways in which photography constructs an imaginary economy. From a materialist perspective, these are reasonable questions, well worth pursuing. Certainly they would seem to he unavoidable for an archive such as this one, assembled in answer to commercial and industrial demands in a region persistently suffering from economic troubles.l

Nonetheless. such questions are easily eclipsed, or simply left unasked. To understand this denial of politics, this depoliticisation of photographic meaning, we need to examine some of the underlying problems of photographic culture. Before we can answer the questions just posed, we need to briefly consider what a photographic archive is, and how it might he interpreted, sampled, or reconstructed in a book. The model of the archive, of the quantitative ensemble of images, is a powerful one in photographic discourse. This model exerts a basic influence on the character of the truths and pleasures experienced in looking at photographs, especially today, when photographic books and exhibitions are being assembled from archives at an unprecedented rate. We might even argue that archival ambitions and procedures are intrinsic to photographic practice.

There are all sorts or photographic archives: commercial archives like Shedden's, corporate archives, government archives, museum archives, historical society archives, amateur archives, family archives, artists' archives, private collectors' archives and so on. Archives are property either of individuals or institutions, and their ownership mayor may not coincide with authorship. One characteristic of photography is that authorship of individual images and the control and ownership of archives do not commonly reside in the same individual. Photographers are detail workers when they are not artists or leisure-time amateurs, and thus it is not unreasonable for the legal theorist Bernard Edelman to label photographers the 'proletarians of creation.l" Leslie Shedden, for his part, was a combination artisan and small entrepreneur. He contributed to company and family archives while retaining his own file of negatives. As is common with commercial photographers, he included these negatives in the sale of his studio to a younger photographer upon retiring in 1977.

Archives, then, constitute a territory if images: the unity of an archive is first and foremost that imposed by ownership. Whether or not the photographs in a particular archive are offered for sale, the general condition of archives involves the subordination of' use to the logic of exchange. Thus not only are the pictures in archives often luerally for sale, but their meanings are up for grabs. New owners are invited, new interpretations are promised. The purchase of reproduction rights under copyright law is also the purchase of a certain semantic licence. This semantic availability of pictures in archives exhibits the same abstract logic as that which characterizes goods in the marketplace.

In an archive, the possibility of meaning is 'liberated' from the actual contingencies of use. But this liberation is also a loss, an abstraction from the complexity and richness of use, a loss of context. Thus the specificity of 'original' uses and

PHOTOGRAPHY BETWEEN LABOUR AND CAPITAL 445

meanings can he avoided and even made invisible, when photographs are selected from an archive and reproduced in a book. (In reverse fashion, photographs can he removed from books and entered into archives, with a similar loss of specificitv.) So new meanings come to supplant old ones, with the archive serving as a kind of 'clearing house' of meaning.

Consider this example: some of the photographs in this book were originally reproduced in the annual reports of the Dominion Steel and Coal Company, others were carried in miners' wallets or framed on the mantelpieces of working-class homes. Imagine two different gazes. Imagine the gaze of a stockholder (who mayor may not have ever visited a coal mine) thumbing his way to the table of earnings and lingering for a moment on the picture of a mining machine, presumably the concrete source of the abstract wealth being accounted for in those pages. Imagine the gaze of a miner, or of a miner's spouse, child, parent, sibling, lover or friend drifting to a portrait during breaks or odd moments during the working day. Most mine workers would agree that the investments behind these looks - financial on the one hand, emotional on the other - are not compatible. But in an archive, the difference, the radical antagonism between these looks is eclipsed. Instead we have two carefully made negatives available for reproduction in a book in which all their similarities and differences could easily be reduced to 'purely visual' concerns. (And even visual differences can be homogenized out of existence when negatives first printed as industrial glossies and others printed on flat paper and tinted by hand are subjected to a uniform standard of printing for reproduction in a book. Thus the difference between a mode of pictorial address which is primarily 'informational' and one which is 'sentimental' is obscured.) In this sense, archives establish a relation of abstract visual equivalence between pictures. Within this regime of the sovereign image, the underlying currents of power are hard to detect, except through the shock of montage, when pictures from antagonistic categories are juxtaposed in a polemical and disorienting way,

Conventional wisdom would have it that photographs transmit immutable truths. But although the very notion of photographic reproduction would seem to suggest that very little is lost in translation, it is clear that photographic meaning depends largely on context. Despite the powerful impression of reality (imparted by the mechanical registration of a moment of reflected light according to the rules of normal perspective), photographs, in themselves, are fragmentary and incomplete utterances. Meaning is always directed by layout, captions, text, and site and mode of presentation. [ ... J Thus, since photographic archives tend to suspend meaning and use, within the archive meaning exists in a state that is both residual and potential. The suggestion of past uses coexists with a plenitude of possibilities. In functional terms, an active archive is like a toolshed, a dormant archive like an abandoned toolshed. (Archives are not like coal mines: meaning is not extracted from nature, but from culture.)

In terms borrowed from linguistics, the archive constitutes the paradigm or iconic system from which photographic 'statements' are constructed. Archival potentials change over time; the keys are appropriated by different disciplines, discourses, 'specialties.' For example, the pictures in photo agency files become available to history when they are no longer useful to topical journalism. Similarly, the new art history of photography at its too prevalent worst rummages through archives of every sort in search of masterpieces to celebrate and sell.

446 ALLAN SEKULA

Clearly archives are not neutral: they embody the power inherent in accumulation, collection, and hoarding as well as that power inherent in the command of the lexicon and rules of a language. Within bourgeois culture, the photographic project itself has been identified from the very beginning not only with the dream of a universal language, but also with the establishment of global archives and repositories according to models offered by libraries, encyclopedias, zoological and botanical gardens, museums, police files, and banks. (Reciprocally, photography contributed to the modernization of information flows within most of these institutions.) Any photographic archive, no matter how small, appeals indirectly to these institutions for its authority. Not only the truths, but also the pleasures of photographiC archives are linked to those enjoyed in these other sites. As for the truths, their philosophical basis lies in an aggressive empiricism, bent on achieving a universal inventory of appearance. Archival projects typically manifest a compulsive desire for completeness, a faith in an ultimate coherence imposed by the sheer quantity of acquisitions. In practice, knowledge of this sort can only be organized according to bureaucratic means. Thus the archival perspective is closer to that of the capitalist, the professional positivist, the bureaucrat and the engineer - not to mention the connoisseur - than it is to that of the working class. Generally speaking, working-class culture is not built on such high ground.

And so archives are contradictory in character. Within their confines meaning is liberated from use, and yet at a more general level an empiricist model of truth prevails. Pictures are atomized, isolated in one way and homogenized in another. (Alphabet soup comes to mind.) But any archive that is not a complete mess establishes an order of some sort among its contents. Normal orders are either taxonomic or diachronic (sequential); in most archives both methods are used, but at different, often alternating, levels of organization. Taxonomic orders might be based on sponsorship, authorship, genre, technique, iconography, subject matter, and so on, depending on the range of the archive. Diachronic orders follow a chronology of production or acquisition. Anyone who has sorted or simply sifted through a box of family snapshots understands the dilemmas (and perhaps the folly) inherent in these procedures. One is torn between narration and categorization, between chronology and inventory.

What should be recognized here is that photographic books (and exhibitions), frequently cannot help but reproduce these rudimentary ordering schemes, and in so doing implicitly claim a share in both the authority and the illusory neutrality of the archive. Herein lies the 'primitivism' of still photography in relation to the cinema. Unlike a film, a photographic book or exhibition can almost always be dissolved back into its component parts, back into the archive. The ensemble can seem to be both provisional and artless. Thus, within the dominant culture of photography, we find a chain of dodges and denials: at any stage of photographic production the apparatus of selection and interpretation is liable to render itself invisible (or conversely to celebrate its own workings as a kind of moral crusade or creative magic). Photographer, archivist, editor and curator can all claim, when challenged about their interpretations, to be merely passing along a neutral reflection of an already established state of affairs. Underlying this process of professional denial is a commonsensical empiricism. The photograph reflects reality. The archive accurately catalogues the ensemble of reflections, and so on.

PHOTOGRAPHY BETWEEN LABOUR AND CAPITAL 447

Even if one admits - as is common enough nowadays - that the photograph interprets reality, it might still follow that the archive accurately catalogues the ensemble of interpretations, and so on again. Songs of the innocence of discovery can be sung at any point. Thus the 'naturalization of the cultural,' seen by Roland Barthes as an essential characteristic of photographic discourse, is repeated and reinforced at virtually every level of the cultural apparatus - unless it is interrupted by criticism. 5

In short, photographic archives by their very structure maintain a hidden connection between knowledge and power. Any discourse that appeals without scepticism to archival standards of truth might well be viewed with suspicion. But what narratives and inventories might be constructed, were we to interpret an archive such as this one in a normal fashion?

I can imagine two different sorts of books being made from Shedden's photographs, or for that matter from any similar archive of functional photographs. On the one hand, we might regard these pictures as 'historical documents.' We might, on the other hand, treat these photographs as 'aesthetic objects.' Two more or less contradictory choices emerge. Are these photographs to be taken as a transparent means to a knowledge - intimate and detailed even if incomplete - of industrial Cape Breton in the postwar decades? Or are we to look at these pictures 'for their own sake,' as opaque ends-in-themselves? This second question has a corollary. Are these pictures products of an unexpected vernacular authorship: is Leslie Shedden a 'discovery' worthy of a minor seat in an expanding pantheon of photographic artists?

Consider the first option. From the first decade of this century, popular histories and especially schoolbook histories have increasingly relied on photographic reproductions. Mass culture and mass education lean heavily on photographic realism, mixing pedagogy and entertainment in an avalanche of images. The look of the past can be retrieved, preserved and disseminated in an unprecedented fashion. But awareness of history as an interpretation of the past succumbs to a faith in history as representation. The viewer is confronted, not by historical-writing, but by the appearance of history itself. Photography would seem to gratify the often quoted desire of that 'master of modern historical scholarship,' Leopold von Ranke, to 'show what actually happened. '6 Historical narration becomes a matter of appealing to the silent authority of the archive, of unobtrusively linking incontestable documents in a seamless account. (The very term 'document' entails a notion of legal or official truth, as well as a notion of proximity to and verification of an original event.) Historical narratives that rely primarily on photography almost invariably are both positivist and historicist in character. For positivism, the camera provides mechanical and thus 'scientifically' objective evidence or 'data.' Photographs are seen as sources of factual, positive knowledge, and thus are appropriate documents for a history that claims a place among the supposedly objective sciences of human b.ehaviour. For historicism, the archive confirms the existence of a linear progression from past to present, and offers the possibility of an easy and unproblematic retrieval of the past from the transcendent position offered by the present. At their worst, pictorial histories offer an extraordinarily reductive view of historical causality: the First World War 'begins' with a glimpse of an assassination in Sarajevo: the entry of the United States into the Second World War 'begins' with a view of wrecked battleships.

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Thus, most visual and pictorial histories reproduce the established patterns of historical thought in bourgeois culture. By doing so in a 'popular' fashion, they extend the hegemony of that culture, while exhibiting a thinly-veiled contempt and disregard for popular literacy. The idea that photography is a 'universal language' contains a persistent element of condescension as well as pedagogical zeal.

The widespread use of photographs as historical illustrations suggests that significant events are those which can be pictured, and thus history takes on the character of spectacle.' But this pictorial spectacle is a kind of rerun, since it depends on prior spectacles for its supposedly 'raw' material. 8 Since the 1920s, the picture press, along with the apparatuses of corporate public relations, publicity, advertising and government propaganda have contributed to a regularized flow of imag~s: of disasters, wars, revolutions, new products, celebrities, political leaders, official ceremonies, public appearances, and so on. For a historian to use such pictures without remarking on these initial uses is naive at best, and cynical at worst. What would it mean to construct a pictorial history of postwar coal mining in Cape Breton by using pictures from a company public relations archive without calling attention to the bias inherent in that source? What present interests might be served by such an oversight?

The viewer of standard pictorial histories loses any ground in the present from which to make critical evaluations. In retrieving a loose succession of fragmentary glimpses of the past, the spectator is flung into a condition of imaginary temporal and geographical mobility. In this dislocated and disoriented state, the only coherence offered is that provided by the constantly shifting position of the camera, which provides the spectator with a kind of powerless omniscience. Thus the spectator comes to identify with the technical apparatus, with the authoritative institution of photography. In the face of this authority, all other forms of telling and remembering begin to fade. But the machine establishes its truth, not by logical argument, but by providing an experience. This experience characteristically veers between nostalgia, horror, and an overriding sense of the exoticism of the past, of its irretrievable otherness for the viewer in the present. Ultimately then, when photographs are uncritically presented as historical documents, they are transformed into aesthetic objects. Accordingly, the pretence to historical understanding remains, although that understanding has been replaced by aesthetic experience."

But what of our second option? Suppose we abandoned all pretence to historical explanation, and treated these photographs as artworks of one sort or another. This book would then be an inventory of aesthetic achievement and/ or an offering for disinterested aesthetic perusal. The reader may well have been prepared for these likelihoods by the simple fact that this book has been published by a press with a history of exclusive concern with the contemporary vanguard art of the United States and Western Europe (and to a lesser extent, Canada). Further, as I've already suggested, in a more fundamental way the very removal of these photographs from their initial contexts invites aestheticism.

I can imagine two ways of converting these photographs into 'works of art,' both a bit absurd, but neither without ample precedent in the current fever to assimilate photography into the discourse and market of the fine arts. The first path follows the traditional -logic of romanticism, in its incessant search for aesthetic origins in a coherent and controlling authorial 'voice.' The second path might be

PHOTOGRAPHY BETWEEN LABOUR AND CAPITAL 449

labelled 'post-romantic' and privileges the subjectivity of the collector, connoisseur, and viewer over that of any specific author. This latter mode of reception treats photographs as 'found objects.' Both strategies can be found in current photographic discourse; often they are intertwined in a single book, exhibition, magazine or journal article. The former tends to predominate, largely because of the continuing need to validate photography as a fine art, which requires an incessant appeal to the myth of authorship in order to wrest photography away from its reputation as a servile and mechanical medium. Photography needs to be won and rewon repeatedly for the ideology of romanticism to take hold. to

The very fact that this book reproduces photographs by a single author might seem to be an implicit concession to a neo-romantic auteurism, But it would be difficult to make a credible argument for Shedden's autonomy as a maker of photographs. Like all commercial photographers, his work involved a negotiation between his own craft and the demands and expectations of his clients. Further, the presentation of his work was entirely beyond his control. One might hypothetically argue that Shedden was a hidden artist, producing an original oeuvre under unfavourable conditions. (,Originality' is the essential qualifying condition of genuine art under the terms dictated by romanticism. To the extent that photography was regarded as a copyist's medium by romantic art critics in the nineteenth century, it failed to achieve the status of the fine arts.) The problem with auteurism, as with so much else in photographiC discourse, lies in its frequent misunderstanding of actual photographic practice. In the wish-fulfilling isolation of the 'author,' one loses sight of the social institutions - corporation, school, family - that are speaking by means of the commercial photographer's craft. One can still respect the craft work of the photographer, the skill inherent in work within a set of formal conventions and economic constraints, while refusing to indulge in romantic hyperbole.

The possible 'post-romantic' or 'post-modern' reception of these photographs is perhaps even more disturbing and more likely. To the extent that photography still occupies an uncertain and problematic position within the fine arts, it becomes possible to displace subjectivity, to find refined aesthetic sensibility not in the maker of images, but in the viewer. Photographs such as these then become the objects of a secondary voyeurism, which preys upon, and claims superiority to, a more naive primary act oflooking. The strategy here is akin to that initiated and established by Pop Art in the early nineteen-sixties. The aesthetically informed viewer examines the artifacts of mass or 'popular' culture with a detached, ironic, and even contemptuous air. For Pop Art and its derivatives, the look of the sophisticated viewer is always constructed in relation to the inferior look which preceded it. What disturbs me about this mode of reception is its covert elitism, its implicit claim to the status of 'superior' spectatorship. A patronizing, touristic, and mock-critical attitude toward 'kitsch' serves to authenticate a high culture that is increasingly indistinguishable from mass culture in many of its aspects, especially in its dependence on marketing and publicity and its fascination with stardom. The possibility of this kind of intellectual and aesthetic arrogance needs to be avoided, especially when a book of photographs by a small-town commercial photographer is published by a press that regularly represents the culture of an international and metropolitan avant-garde.

In general, then, the hidden imperatives of photographic culture drag us in two contradictory directions: toward 'science' and a myth of 'objective truth' on the

450 ALLAN SEKULA

one hand, and toward 'art' and a cult of 'subjective experience' on the other. This dualism haunts photography, lending a certain goofy inconsistency to most commonplace assertions about the medium. We repeatedly hear the following refrain. Photography is an art. Photography is a science (or at least constitutes a 'scientific' way of seeing). Photography is both an art and a science. In response to these claims, it becomes important to argue that photography is neither art nor science, but is suspended between both the discourse of science and that of art, staking its claims to cultural value on both the model of truth upheld by empirical science and the model of pleasure and expressiveness offered by romantic aesthetics. In its own erratic way, photographic discourse has attempted to bridge the extreme philosophical and institutional separation of scientific and artistic practice that has characterized bourgeois society since the late eighteenth century. As a mechanical medium which radically transformed and displaced earlier artisanal and manual modes of visual representation, photography is implicated in a sustained crisis at the very centre of bourgeois culture, a crisis rooted in the emergence of science and technology as seemingly autonomous productive forces. At the heart of this crisis lies the question of the survival and deformation of human creative energies under the impact of mechanization. The institutional promotion of photography as a fine art serves to redeem technology by suggesting that subjectivity and the machine are easily compatible. Especially today, photography contributes to the illusion of a humanized technology, open both to 'democratic' self expression and to the mysterious workings of genius. In this sense, the camera seems the exemplar of the benign machine, preserving a moment of creative autonomy that is systematically denied in the rest of most people's lives. The one-sided Iyricism of this view is apparent when we consider the myriad ways in which photography has served as a tool of industrial and bureaucratic power. II

If the position of photography within bourgeois culture is as problematic as I am suggesting here, then we might want to move away from the art-historicist bias that governs most contemporary discussions of the medium. We need to understand how photography works within everyday life in advanced industrial societies: the problem is one of materialist cultural history rather than art history. This is a matter of beginning to figure out how to read the making and reception of ordinary pictures. Leslie Shedden's photographs would seem to allow for an exemplary insight into the diverse and contradictory ways in which photography affects the lives of working people.

Let's begin again by recognizing that we are confronting a curious archive - divided and yet connected elements of an imaginary social mechanism. Pictures that depict fixed moments in an interconnected economy of flows: of coal, money, machines, consumer goods, men, women, children. Pictures that are themselves elements in a unified symbolic economy - a traffic in photographs - a traffic made up of memories, commemorations, celebratlons, testimonials, evidence, facts, fantasies. Here are official pictures, matter-of-factly committed to the charting and celebration of progress. A mechanical conveyor replaces a herd of ponies. A mechanical miner replaces ten human miners. A diesel engine replaces a locomotive. Here also are private pictures, personal pictures, family pictures: weddings, graduations, family groups. One is tempted at the outset to distinguish two distinct realisms, the instrumental realism of the industrial photograph and the sentimental realism of the

PHOTOGRAPHY BETWEEN LABOUR AND CAPITAL 451

f~mily phot~graph. And yet it would seem clear that these are not mutually exclusive categones. Industrial photographs may well be commissioned, executed, displayed, and viewed in a spirit of calculation and rationality. Such pictures seem to offer unambiguous truths, the useful truths of applied science. But a zone of virtu~lly unacknowledged ciffects can also be reached by photographs such as these, touchmg on an aesthetics of power, mastery, and control. The public optimism that suffuses these pictures is merely a respectable, sentimentally-acceptable, and ideologically necessary substitute for deeper feelings - the cloak for an aesthetics of exploitation. In other words, even the blandest pronouncement in words and pictures from an office of corporate public relations has a subtext marked by threats and fear. (After all, under .capitali~m everyone's job is on the line.) Similarly, no family photograph succeeds m creatmg a haven of pure sentiment. This is especially true for people who feel the persistent pressures of economic distress, and for whom even the making of a photograph has to be carefully counted as an expense. Granted, there are moments in which the photograph overcomes separation and loss, therein lies much of the emotional power of photography. Especially in a mining community, the life of the emotions is persistently tied to the instrumental workings underground. More than elsewhere, a photograph can become without warning a tragic memento.

One aim of this essay, then, is to provide certain conceptual tools for a unified understanding of the social workings of photography in an industrial environment. This project might take heed of some of Walter Benjamin's last advice, from his argument for a historical materialist alternative to a historicism that inevitably empathized 'with the victors':

There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another. A historical materialist therefore dissociates himself from it as far as possible. He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain.12

Benjamin's wording here is careful. Neither the contents, nor the forms, nor the many receptions and interpretations of the archive of human achievements can be assumed to be innocent. And further, even the concept of 'human achievements' has to be used with critical emphasis in an age of automation. The archive has to be read from below, from a position of solidarity with those displaced, deformed, silenced or made invisible by the machineries of profit and progress.

Notes

Walter Benjamin, 'Theses on the Philosophy of History' (1940), in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York. 1969), p.255.

2 Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, Vent d'Est (Rome Paris Berlin 1969) filmscript published in Jean-Luc Godard, WeekendlWindjrom :he Eas; (New York, 1972), p.179.

3 'What is represented in ideology is therefore not the system of the real relations which govern the existence of individuals, but the imaginary relation of those

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individuals to the real relations its which they live.' Louis Althusser, 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses' (1969), in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York, 1971), P: 165. Althusser's model of ideology is based in part on Marx and in part on the work of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Without belabouring this lineage, or explaining it further, I would like to refer the Canadian reader especially to a work by Lacari's first English translator and critical interpreter. Anthony Wilden: The lmaBinary Canadian: An Examination Jor Discovery (Vancouver. 1980).

4 Bernard Edelman, Le Droit saisi par la photoqraphic (Paris, 1973), trans. Elizabeth Kingdom. Ownership if the [maBe: Elements Jor a Marxist Theory if Law (London. 1979), p.45.

5 Roland Barthes, 'Rhetorique de l'image,' Communications 4 (1964). in [maBe, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath New York. 1977), p.51.

6 Leopold von Ranke, preface to Histories if the Latin and Germanic Nations from 1494-1514, in The Varieties if History, ed. Fritz Stern (New York, 1972), p.57.

7 See Guy DeBord. La Societe du spectacle (Paris, 1967), unauthorized translation. SOciety if the Spectacle (Detroit, 1970, revised edition, 1977).

8 We might think here of the reliance by the executive branch of the United States government on 'photo opportunities.' For a discussion of an unrelated example see Susan Sontag's dissection of Leni Riefenstahl's alibi that Triumph if the Will was merely an innocent documentary of the orchestrated-for-cinema 1934 Nuremberg Rally of the National Socialists. Sontag quotes Riefenstahl: 'Everything is genuine ... It is history pure history.' Susan Sontag, 'Fascinating Fascism,' New York Review if Books, Vol. XXII, No.1 February 1975), reprinted in Under the SiBn if Saturn. (New York 1980). p.82.

9 Two recent books counter this prevailing tendency in 'visual history' by directing attention to the power relationships behind the making of pictures: C. Herron. S. Hoffmitz , W. Roberts, R. Storey, All That Our Hands Have Done: A Pictorial History if the Hamilton Workers (Oaksille, Ontario, 1981): and Sarah Graham-Brown Palestinians and Their SOCiety 1880-1946 (London, 1980).

lOIn the first category are books which discover unsung commercial photographers: e.g., Mike Disfarmer, Diifarmer: The Heber SprinBs Portraits, text by Julia Scully (Danbury. New Hampshire. 1976). In the second category are books which testify to the aesthetic sense of the collector: e.g., Sam Wagstaff, A Book ifPhotoBraphsfrom the Collection if Sam WaBstc!ff(New York, 1978).

11 This passage restates an argument made in my essay, 'The Traffic in Photographs' The Art Journal, Vol. 41, No. I (Spring 1981), pp.15-16.

12 Walter Benjamin. 'Theses on the Philosophy of History,' pp.256-57.

Index

abstract seeing 93

academic spectator 369-71 access, consent and 254, 275-87 Adams, A. 176,229,231-2 Adamson, R. 158

Adas, M. 367

Adobe Photoshop 225

advertisements 109,160-1,210-11,245,

311-12; rhetoric of the image 114-25 aesthetic moment 211-15,267-8 affectivity 211-15

Africa 313,314

Agee, J. 268-9

agency, abandonment of 186

agony, photographs of 254, 288-90 Alexander, V. 155, 160, 161-2, 163,

182

Alinder, M.S. 232

Allen, N.W. 219

Allende, S. 315, 319 Alloula, M. 370

Alloway, L. 102

Altamira 67-8

'altars' 393

Altman, R. 222

Alvarado, M. 364

American life 175-6 America Online 230 American Civil War 70, 100 Amos, E. 394

anamnesis 27-8

anchorage 117-18

Andrew, D. 6-7 Anglo-American formalism 83 anonymity of photographer 71-4 appropriation 152-5,171-3 Arbeiter Fotographen 191

Arbus, D. 264, 270, 437 architecture 165

archives: digital 229-34; industrial

environment 420, 443-52 Arnheim, R. 219

Arnoux, A. 48

arrangement 5, 172

arresting images 289

art 70-1, 89; conceptual art 437; institutions 419, 422-7; mechanical reproduction and 15, 42-52; photographs as art or technology 55-7; photographs of an industrial environment 448-50; photography as meta-art 60; photography as new instrument of vision 94-5; postmodernism in 166-70, 177-8,188-9; revolutionary art 56-7, 82-3; science vs 50-1, 224-5,450; theory, photography and 420,435-42

art photography 32, 77-8, 103, 173; development of 436-7; nature and self 411; andpostmodernism 149,152-63; and reality 315-16